Iraq & Vietnam...

[COMMENT: I suppose the Vietnam war will be debated as will
the role of FDR and many other issues. But this appears to me to be
accurate. The fellow who wrote the final article certainly has the
credentials. (See at end.)

The capacity for the pseudo-liberals to betray America is
equaled only by the capacity of pseudo-conservatives for fall for their
betrayal. Neither side has its roots in the Biblical tradition -- or much
honest interest in the truth. E. Fox]

During the Japanese occupation of Vietnam my
wife Hai's uncle disappeared. He was about 20 years old at the time and
the family never saw or heard of him again, this was about a year before
Hai was born. Everyone thought that he had been killed in the war as many
were. Any Japanese soldier could shoot any Vietnamese with impunity and
many did.

When Saigon fell in 1975, those of Hai's
family who were still in Vietnam were astounded when the missing uncle
turned up as a Colonel and head of the North Vietnamese secret police in
charge of Saigon. When Hai saw him in 1993 he was retired and literally on
his death bed, but he confirmed many of the things that are covered in
the article following this one. In particular
about the fact that after TET of 68 the North had been so badly
beaten that they were discussing some type of cease fire and settlement
but abandoned that idea because of the anti war activities that were
taking place in the United States. He said that the head politicians and
the general staff would meet every morning to listen to the BBC to see
what the anti war protesters were doing and then plan their strategy from
there. Colonel Bui who now lives in Paris has given a similar account of
events in various interviews he has given.

If memory serves me right, I believe that in
1968 there had been about 42 or 44 thousand Americans killed in the
Vietnam War. Had the war ended shortly after TET of 68 there would have
been far fewer American casualties than the 55 thousand plus that we wound
up with. However the law of unintended consequences ruled and thousands
more Americans were killed as the result of the anti war movement and the
effect that they had on the enemy's strategy and the boost in moral they
gave to the enemy that encouraged them to keep fighting for a military
victory rather than a political solution.

"It's like they're just making it up as they go
along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."--Senator Chuck
Hagel (R., Neb.), June 27, 2005, U.S. News & World Report.

"And we are now in a seemingly intractable
quagmire. Our troops are dying and there really is no end in sight."--Senator
Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), June 23, 2005, Armed Services Committee
hearing.

The polls show the American people are growing
pessimistic about Iraq, and no wonder. They are being rallied against
the cause by such statesmen as the two above. Six months after they
repudiated the insurgency in a historic election, free Iraqis are
continuing to make slow but steady political and military gains. Where
the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington, D.C.

This is despite tangible, albeit underreported,
progress in Iraq. In the political arena, an Iraqi transition government
has formed that includes representatives from all ethnic and religious
groups. Leading Sunnis who boycotted January's election are now
participating both in the parliament and in drafting a new constitution.
The Shiite uprising of a year ago has been defeated. The government now
has three deadlines to meet: drafting a constitution by August, a
referendum on that constitution in October and elections for a permanent
government in December.

This political momentum vindicates the decision to
hold the January election, despite warnings that it was "going to be
ugly" (in Joe Biden's phrase). Some of those who predicted the worst
because the Sunnis refused to participate--Mr. Biden, the Hoover
Institution's Larry Diamond--are the same people who now say again that
disaster looms. Clearly the smart strategy was to move ahead with the
vote and show the Sunnis they had to participate if they wanted a role
in building the new Iraq. So why should we believe these pessimists now?

As for security, the daily violence is terrible and
dispiriting, but it is not a sign of an expanding insurgency. As U.S.
and Iraqi military targets have hardened their defenses, the terrorists
have turned to larger bombs delivered by suicidal jihadists aimed at
softer targets. This drives up the casualty figures, especially against
Iraqi civilians, but it does not win more political converts.

Insurgencies that have prevailed in history--Algeria,
China, Cuba--have all had a large base of popular support. That more of
the bombers seem to be coming from outside Iraq is cause for worry,
since it means there will be a continuing supply of suicide bombers. But
it also means that the insurgency is becoming an invasion force against
Iraq itself, which means it lacks the native roots to sustain it.

The trend is in fact toward more civilian cooperation
with Iraqi and U.S. security forces. Calls to the military hotline have
climbed to 1,700 from 50 in January, according to U.S. commanders, and
better intelligence has led to the recent capture of key insurgent
leaders, including a top deputy to Musab al-Zarqawi. An Iraqi TV show
profiling captured jihadists--"Terrorism in the Hands of Justice"--is a
popular hit.

Everyone wishes that Iraqi security forces could be
trained faster to replace U.S. troops, and to secure areas from which
terrorists have been ousted. But here, too, there has been progress.
About 100 Iraqi units are now able to conduct special operations on
their own. General George Casey, the Iraq theater commander, says there
has not been a single failure of an Iraqi military unit since the
election. And new recruits continue to volunteer, even though this makes
them terrorist targets.

Regarding Mr. Kennedy's "quagmire" claim, General
Casey had this response: "I thought I was fairly clear in what I laid
out in my testimony about what's going on in Iraq, that you have an
insurgency with no vision, no base, limited popular support, an elected
government, committed Iraqis to the democratic process, and you have
Iraqi security forces that are fighting and dying for their country
every day. Senator, that is not a quagmire."

So why the Washington panic? A large part of
it is political. As Democrats see support for the war falling in the
polls, the most cynical smell an opening for election gains in 2006.
The Republican Hagels, who voted for the war only reluctantly, see
another opening to assail the "neo-cons" and get Donald Rumsfeld fired.
Still others are merely looking for political cover. Rather than fret
(for the TV cameras) about "the "public going south" on the war, South
Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham could do more for the cause by trying to
educate Americans and rally their support.

It isn't as if the critics are offering any better
strategy for victory. At last week's Senate hearing, Carl Levin's (D.,
Mich.) brainstorm was that the U.S. set a withdrawal schedule if Iraqis
miss their deadline in writing a constitution. But U.S. officials have
all stressed to Iraqis how important that deadline is. Mr. Biden
delivered a lecture last week that boiled down to letting France train
1,500 Iraqi "gendarmes" and pressing for 5,000 NATO troops to patrol the
Syrian border. Both are fine with us, assuming Mr. Biden gets to
negotiate with the French, but neither is going to turn the tide of war.

The proposal to fix a date certain for U.S. withdrawal
is especially destructive, inviting the terrorists to wait us out and
Iraqi ethnic groups to start arming themselves. The only
important idea we've heard from Congress is John McCain's suggestion
that if Damascus keeps abetting the insurgency, the U.S. is under no
obligation to honor Syria's territorial integrity when pursuing
terrorists seeking sanctuary in that country.

President Bush plans to speak about Iraq tomorrow, and
we hope he points out that this Beltway panic is hurting the war effort.
General John Abizaid of the U.S. Central Command stressed this point
last week. Troop morale, he said, has never been better. But "when I
look back here at what I see is happening in Washington, within the
Beltway, I've never seen the lack of confidence greater."

He added that, "When my soldiers say to me and ask me
the question whether or not they've got support from the American people
or not, that worries me. And they're starting to do that." Mr. Bush will
no doubt remind Americans of the stakes in Iraq, but he also needs to
point out that defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- Any seasoned reporter
covering the Tet offensive in Vietnam 36 years ago is well over 60 and
presumably retired or teaching journalism is one of America's 4,200
colleges and universities. Before plunging into an orgy of erroneous and
invidious historical parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, a reminder about
what led to the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia is timely.

Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front
collapses, as it did following the Tet offensive, which began on the eve
of the Chinese New Year, Jan. 31, 1968. The surprise attack was designed
to overwhelm some 70 cities and towns, and 30 other strategic objectives
simultaneously. By breaking a previously agreed truce for Tet festivities,
master strategist Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi calculated that South
Vietnamese troops would be caught with defenses down.

After the first few hours of panic, the South Vietnamese
troops reacted fiercely. They did the bulk of the fighting and took some
6,000 casualties. Vietcong units not only did not reach a single one of
their objectives -- except when they arrived by taxi at the U.S. Embassy
in Saigon, blew their way through the wall into the compound and guns
blazing made it into the lobby before they were wiped out by U.S. Marines
-- but they lost some 50,000 killed and at least that many wounded. Giap
had thrown some 70,000 troops into a strategic gamble that was also
designed to overwhelm 13 of the 16 provincial capitals and trigger a
popular uprising. But Tet was an unmitigated military disaster for Hanoi
and its Vietcong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that was not the way it was
reported in U.S. and other media around the world. It was television's
first war. And some 50 million Americans at home saw the carnage of dead
bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans running around.

As the late veteran war reporter Peter Braestrup
documented in "Big Story" -- a massive, two-volume study of how Tet was
covered by American reporters -- the Vietcong offensive was depicted as a
military disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a
week or two later from RAND Corp. interrogations of prisoners and
defectors, the damage had been done. Conventional media wisdom had been
set in concrete. Public opinion perceptions in the United States changed
accordingly.

RAND made copies of these POW interrogations available.
But few reporters seemed interested. In fact, the room where they were on
display was almost always empty. Many Vietnamese civilians who were fence
sitters or leaning toward the Vietcong, especially in the region around
Hue City, joined government ranks after they witnessed Vietcong
atrocities. Several mass graves were found with some 4,000 unarmed civil
servants and other civilians, stabbed or with skulls smashed by clubs. The
number of communist defectors, known as "chieu hoi," increased fourfold.
And the "popular uprising" anticipated by Giap, failed to materialize. The
Tet offensive also neutralized much of the clandestine communist
infrastructure.

As South Vietnamese troops fought Vietcong remnants in
Cholon, the predominantly Chinese twin city of Saigon, reporters, sipping
drinks in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel, watched the fireworks 2
miles away. America's most trusted newsman, CBS' Walter Cronkite, appeared
for a standup piece with distant fires as a backdrop. Donning helmet,
Cronkite declared the war lost. It was this now famous television news
piece that persuaded President Johnson six weeks later, on March 31, not
to run. His ratings had plummeted from 80 percent when he assumed the
presidency upon Kennedy's death to 30 percent after Tet. His handling of
the war dropped to 20 percent, his credibility shot to pieces.

Until Tet, a majority of Americans agreed with
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson that failure was not an option. It
was Kennedy who changed the status of U.S. military personnel from
advisers to South Vietnamese troops to full-fledged fighting men.
By the time of Kennedy's assassination in Nov. 22, 1963, 16,500 U.S.
troops had been committed to the war. Johnson escalated all the way to
542,000. But defeat became an option when Johnson decided the war was
unwinnable and that he would lose his bid for the presidency in November
1968. Hanoi thus turned military defeat into a priceless
geopolitical victory.

With the Vietcong wiped out in the Tet offensive, North
Vietnamese regulars moved south down the Ho Chi Minh trails through Laos
and Cambodia to continue the war. Even Giap admitted in his
memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the anti-war
demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of
negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would
now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the
possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp.

Hanoi's Easter offensive in March 1972 was another
disaster for the communists. Some 70,000 North Vietnamese troops were
wiped out -- by the South Vietnamese who did all the fighting. The last
American soldier left Vietnam in March 1973. And the chances of the South
Vietnamese army being able to hack it on its own were reasonably good.
With one proviso: Continued U.S. military assistance with weapons and
hardware, including helicopters. But Congress balked, first by cutting off
military assistance to Cambodia, which enabled Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge
communists to take over, which, in turn, was followed by a similar
Congressional rug pulling from under the South Vietnamese, that led to
rapid collapse of morale in Saigon.

The unraveling, with Congress pulling the
string, was so rapid that even Giap was caught by surprise. As he recounts
in his memoirs, Hanoi had to improvise a general offensive -- and then
rolled into Saigon two years before they had reckoned it might become
possible.

That is the real lesson for the U.S. commitment
to Iraq. Whatever one thought about the advisability of Operation
Iraqi Freedom, the United States is there with 100,000 troops and a solid
commitment to endow Iraq with a democratic system of government.
While failure is not an option for Bush, it clearly is for Sen. Edward
Kennedy, D-Mass., who called Iraq the president's Vietnam. It is,
of course, no such animal. But it could become so if Congressional resolve
dissolves.

Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the
North Vietnamese army, received South Vietnam's unconditional surrender on
April 30, 1975. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his
retirement, he made clear the anti-war movement in the United States,
which led to the collapse of political will in Washington, was "essential
to our strategy."

Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former
Attorney General Ramsey Clark and various church ministers "gave us
confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses."

America lost the war, concluded Bui Tin,
"because of its democracy. Through dissent and protest it lost the ability
to mobilize a will to win." Kennedy should remember that Vietnam was the
war of his brother who saw the conflict in the larger framework of the
Cold War and Nikita Khrushchev's threats against West Berlin. It would
behoove Kennedy to see Iraq in the larger context of the struggle to bring
democracy, not only to Iraq, but the entire Middle East.

(Arnaud de Borchgrave covered Tet as Newsweek's chief
foreign correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam between 1951 under
the French and 1972.)